Looking for Richard

In the comments a few days ago, someone asked me to look into the orthography of Keith Richards changing his name to Richard and then back again to Richards. Granting that I don't know what "orthography" means, I am not one to back down from a challenge.

The name switch sounds at first blush utterly pointless; "Richard" is not any easier to remember or simpler to pronounce than "Richards" is. It shouldn't come as any surprise that this ploy was hatched by Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who was only 19 when he came up with this one, just after the band's first single (a cover of a Chuck Berry song called "Come On") came out in England in the summer of 1963. The stated reason was that it echoed the name of the British Elvis, Cliff Richard (Little Richard would have made more sense). This seems lame even by the standards of Andrew Loog Oldham, and is believed to be the last time the Rolling Stones ever attempted to connect themselves with Cliff Richard.

It is a somewhat open question as to when Keith changed his surname back to his father's. The August 19, 1971, issue of Rolling Stone magazine proudly boasts of its interview with "Keith Richard." My copy of Exile on Main St., which was released on May 12, 1972, clearly lists among its credits the guitar work and songwriting of one Keith Richards. Maybe Andrew Loog Oldham thought he would benefit from the association with Mary Richards. I haven't been able to narrow down the date any further than that. Perhaps at some point, deep in the South of France, Keith took a look at his passport and said to himself, "Wot? Who changed my name?"

OPC's Review of the 'New York Times Book Review'

Here are a few of the lead sentences to reviews found in this morning's New York Times Book Review:

* "It's a familiar exchange: I step up to the counter at a convenience store and order my daily ration of Camel cigarettes, which I have been smoking since the Reagan administration and, as it happens, as I type this."

* "It's odd the books people get asked to review. Take this one, a carefree history of our long love affair with drinking. I have no training as a historian, just some slight experience on both sides of bars."

* "A few years back, when my son was in college, he had to mail a letter."

* "Until I received the assignment to review Everett True's Nirvana, I hadn't listened to the band much in recent years."

That's when I gave up, tossed the section aside, and went back to working on the crossword puzzle in the magazine. I am greatly interested in the band Nirvana, and fairly interested in Everett True's book on them, but it is impossible to understate my interest in the amount of time Benjamin Kunkel (who wrote that last quoted sentence) has spent listening to Nirvana. (Hey, Kunkel: They're still great.) Wait, maybe you can understate it, because I am even less interested in the circumstances under which he received an assignment to write about Everett True's Nirvana for the New York Times Book Review. (Tom Carson, who is a true pro, by contrast manages to make it through a review of the new Warren Zevon book without writing about himself at all.)

At least with Dave Barry, who wrote the third sentence quoted up there, I was reading the review because I was more interested in Dave Barry than in the book under review, so I suppose he's entitled to write about himself. But Benjamin Kunkel? Robert R. Harris? Jonathan Miles? I couldn't give a rip about any of those guys, and if Sam Tanenhaus continues to let them write about themselves rather than the books of the moment, I won't give much of a rip about the New York Times Book Review either.

Quote of the Day

"The South is the only place in America where you can get decent food." -- Mick Jagger

Of Very Low Character

This morning my iPod coughed up R.E.M.'s "Get Up," from the album Green. Thirteen letters for artist, song title and album title.

That sounded pretty impressive, but then I thought of a song that would get the job done in a mere seven characters: "40" from the U2 album War. That one's not on my iPod, though.

Blog News

We got a lot of letters here at OPC, or at least we like to pretend we do. Mostly they're along the lines of "Where do you get off busting on a true artist like Tom Petty?" and "I write way better than you, why can't I get my own blog?" and, most chillingly, "What r u wearing?"

Here's one from a Mr. Peter Yarrow of New York City:

"One Poor Correspondent" is the best thing that has happened to me since the day I got out of prison. Is there some simple way I can tell my friends about it?

Whoops, that was actually supposed to be Name Withheld by Request. Oh well, too late now. Well, Mr. Request, this is your lucky day, because OPC now comes with a special feature allowing you to email posts to Paul, Mary, and whomever else you'd like to clue in. Just click on the little envelope with the arrow at the bottom of each post, and OPC will do the rest. And the best thing is, this feature is retroactive, so you can dig into our archives and send off that post on "The Name Game" that made such a deep impression on all of you.

Thanks, NWR!

You're So Very Mary, Mary

To follow up on my earlier post about the deglamorized world of Seventies sitcoms, does it seems odd to anyone else that Mary Richards didn't have an on-air role (sporadic appearances aside)? Mary Tyler Moore had been one of the most fabulous housewives to ever wear Capri pants when she costarred on The Dick Van Dyke Show in the early Sixties (in which the star similarly took an off-camera role in television production). Let loose on her own, she downshifted from accessorizing and occasionally appearing on national TV in New York to a behind-the-scenes post on local TV in Minneapolis. Ten years later, Maggie Seaver of Growing Pains would stumble into an on-air reporting gig, but the gorgeous Mary remained an associate producer, earning less money than a secretary.

In Minneapolis, no less, although that's certainly better than the dreary apartment in Indianapolis the gals from One Day at a Time suffered through. Producer Allan Burns has explained that they chose Minneapolis because they wanted a lot of indoor sets to foster conversational scenes, so they opted for a setting where the weather wasn't good. In any event, Mary ended up living in a $130-a-month room on the second floor of a house, sleeping on a foldout bed and tucking her pillow away behind the door of an armoire each morning.

An on-air role never seems to have been considered for Mary. The show seems to suggest, through the buffoonish Ted Baxter, that on-air talent is somewhat evanescent and that the real talent behind the WJM news team was the bearlike Lou Grant and the bald Murray Slaughter. Given the choice between joining either group, and even given the occasional appearances of Gordy the weatherman, Mary appears to have made the right decision. What this says for the relationship between the producers of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the actors therein, I could not tell you.

Thesis

I haven't had much time for posting lately, so I'll just throw this out there: "Free Bird" is the American "Stairway to Heaven." Discuss.

Good Times and Happy Days

The Bunkers’ first floor consisted of a living room, with one end set up as a dining room, and a kitchen. There was no front hall, no family room, not even a bathroom; Archie flushed upstairs. The living room was furnished with two chairs, one of them wooden and uncomfortable-looking, and a couch. The dining room had a round wooden table and chairs. The kitchen had nothing.

But the Bunkers enjoyed far from the shabbiest living conditions on the sitcoms of the 1970s, even disregarding the tent those surgeons in Korea lived in. The Kotters lived in a one-room apartment the next borough over from the Bunkers, with a closet that was helpfully but unnecessarily labeled; Mary Tyler Moore lived in a one-room apartment in Minneapolis. (Her upstairs neighbor didn’t even have a door.) Alice Hyatt let her son have the bedroom in the one-bedroom apartment they shared in Phoenix; Alice slept on the couch. Laverne and Shirley shared a one-bedroom “garden” (i.e., basement) apartment in Milwaukee. Jack, Chrissy and Janet all shared a two-bedroom apartment, but at least they had the promise of sensual hijinks. Across town, Fred Sanford and his son lived in a junkyard in the L.A. ghetto of Watts, which may or may not have been more attractive than the high-rise housing project the Evans family of Chicago called home. Across town from them, Bob Hartley -- a doctor! -- lived in a two-bedroom apartment of his own.

These shows may not have dealt directly with economic issues on a regular basis, and they weren’t trying to achieve some sort of kitchen-sink realism. No one would confuse the four twentysomethings who made up the Sweathogs with actual high school kids. But there was a determined deglamorization at work, or at least a nonglamorization. In the Nineties, the dramatic series NYPD Blue was acclaimed for its dank naturalism, but its set at least had arty slats of light coming in through the windows. The detectives room of the Twelfth Precinct, by contrast, where Barney Miller’s men worked, didn’t even have windows.

Was there something about the 1970s that caused people to want to watch sitcom characters in grimy settings? The credit sequences for Welcome Back, Kotter made Brooklyn look like East Berlin, albeit an East Berlin coated with graffiti. Or did TV executives just not realize how much more palatable it would be to see sparkling, spacious homes? After The Cosby Show debuted in 1984, every sitcom turned into The Jeffersons, a largely urban fantasy of movin' on up. The change, it seems to me, was not for the better.

Tom Poston, 1921-2007

You probably know that he married Suzanne Pleshette when he was 80 years old. You probably didn't know that, like me, he was allergic to onions. You probably didn't care that he appeared on The Match Game. Tom Poston, dead at the age of 85.

His dying words were: "Bill Daily lives on."

The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, and It Stayed Down

Like my brother before me, I took a rebel stand
He was just eighteen, proud and brave
When a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the blood below my feet
You can't raise a Kane back up when he's in defeat

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't Virgil saying that his family can't fight back when they've been knocked down? That they're a bunch of quitters?